Meta Monday – Nostrix Porter Combo

Hello again and welcome back to Meta Monday! I was away for the weekend at GP Seattle, where I got a chance to hang out with Magikarp, JesterOfJank and DunkelWerk, and play a ton of Legacy MTG. I ran into Calimdir a few times, who was Eldrazi Taxing people to death in Modern MTG side events. Unfortunately I was not able to pay much attention to things in the Eternal world, so this week’s write up will be shorter than usual.

Two members of Team Rankstar made the top 8 of the ETS this past weekend! Great work ThePlatypusKing and a Sifudanny for your performance in the event! Team Rankstar loves FTP Moment, so we are always excited to see it innovated and doing well. The addition of Kaleb’s Choice and Molot & Nakova seems to have helped the deck a lot. Hooru Fliers also seemed like a strong choice, with a good match up versus the field. While it can struggle a bit with aggro, in a midrange or Tacrod Meta, the deck performs rather well. Another TRS favorite is absolute jank, which Top8 brought in the form of Headgear. This deck is packed full of flavor, combining Crown of Possibilities with Mask of Torment. I touched on a similar list last week, so I am very pleased to see it perform so well this week!

Here we have a spicy little number with unknown origins. we originally saw a player utilizing the Nostrix and porter package but all evidence had mysteriously vanished… maybe it was a dream created by the great owls!

The idea of the deck is to utilize the current and very effective Hooru shell and switch into a much more exciting win condition package — rather than Sword and Channel or Daraka and Eilyn, we have the more combo and tutor package with Cliffside Porter and Nostrix.

There are some cool pieces in the deck with Press-Gang allowing us more access to our porters as well as being a reasonable substitute for Nostrix mentoring due to the revenge effect allowing us to get full value.
The deck has access to some cool synergy too as we can Strategize away a Porter if we have none in the deck and then tutor them up again with our Press Gang to get even more going!

Probably the greatest thing about the deck is that we are flying in the face of In Cold Blood. Our main win condition is a Primal one drop and we have the backup plan of Channel the Tempest to the face which even has some great late game power with the echo cards!

Overall I wouldn’t recommend running out and crafting the deck, as it is a bit of a meme, but there is definitely a floor to how bad a deck playing four Hailstorm and four Harsh Rule can actually be.
Perhaps even going forward we could move away from being cute and move more towards utilizing Thunderstrike Dragons as they’re my card of the month right now!

I really thought that In Cold Blood was the final nail in the coffin for Nostrix, Lord of Visions but this just goes to show that even after we think every great player and deckbuilder has discovered everything there is to discover there is still more to find.